Anyone do anime? I've been teaching myself photoshop for about 3 years now... it's absolutely pitiful of me but I just picked up dodge and burn about two days ago hahahahahah... oh the things we miss when we try to teach ourselves between college courses in a given day :P haha

Anyhoo, here is an image I cooked up tonight (yes I know her eyes are not developped well... but it's just me testing dodge and burn with coloring my images in... )
http://www.vbhelp.net/bunnygirl.jpg

Living in Japan, I see quite enough of it to want to do something different I have a lot of time for Miyazaki Hayo's flicks and others like ghost in the shell; Akira was nuts but very slick and watchable. There was a TV series called Lain which looked neat (couldn't understand half of what was going on though, my Japanese is crap) but I never got to see the end of it as I don't watch much telly.
The lightly shaded look of cartoons in general is an artifact of their function; either they have to be animated and therefore can't be too detailed; the same applies to a comic book where similar time constraints usually apply (not always though, a lot of stuff is very detailed such as some of the sandman books and strips such as slaine); therefore, I think it's perhaps better to spend time on a detailed still image rather than draw unanimated anime. The word itself, you may have noticed, is a mutation of Animtation; Manga would be closer to what you mean.

I don't consider myself as "real" manga-ka (comic writer/artist), cos I'm not one. I just doodle around, get an idea and draw them in a story board. Huh? Oh, I'd better stop rambling...

Well, anime like other hobbies sometimes runs out of steam that makes it worthwhile. So I didn't find that some might get bored of them after a while. But onme thing is for sure, manga & anime has brought a lot of maturity to the term "cartoon". They gave a good medium for people to express their ideas, something that was never done in western animation. Epic stories of huge worlds, sci-fi flicks, etc. were carefully thought out and beautifully presented to the masses. Mainly, anime & manga have changed the perspective that most people had on animation or cartoons. Uh... Enuff ranting...